At length a line of unlovely grey houses stood by the roadside on a broad green ridge, the telegraph wire sent a feeler down into one of these, and a modest signboard presently introduced to us the Quellyn Arms. It was a very small hotel indeed, but it contained a smell of fried bacon that would have filled St Paul’s, and an ignorance of the English language that was almost equally stupendous. We were at this moment on a flank of Snowdon, as we stretched our stiff legs along the horse-hair chairs; the terminus of the Snowdon Railway was above us, within a stone’s-throw, and a toy train was curling incredibly round corners and down into a green valley that was dovetailed in among the great roots of the mountain. Outside the parlour window a thick-set figure with a long stick waited immovably--as immovably as Snowdon, or as the misty
[Illustration: _The Snowdon guide outside the parlour window._]
cloud in which its horns were plunged. As we momently grew stiffer, the probability that the sun would rise next morning seemed slighter than usual, and we tried to persuade the thick-set man to regard the position from our point of view. But a Snowdon guide has an optimism about sunrises, and a conviction in the matter of a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush.
This, we were assured, was the longest day in the year. It would be light all night. There was a very good hotel on the top to which he, Griffith Roberts, had guided forty people the night before, all of whom had seen Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man at sunrise.
Miss Jones, the landlady’s daughter, interpreted these things to us, and we recognised compassion in her eye as she did so. Our craven hearts sank low; but we realised that, as Mark Twain has sufficingly expressed, we must “crowd through or bust.”
The ascent of Snowdon began as seductively, as gently, as the first step towards a great crime. A grassy cart-track curved idly through pastures that had just a perceptible heavenward tendency, enough to stimulate the traveller and flatter his vigour and prowess. The air was bland and sweet, and the clouds that had been solemnly seated on the mountain began to move away in vagrant wisps and shreds, baring the ponderous side and shoulder and the white track that climbed them at what we considered an absurdly easy gradient.